How to Share Email Messages and Attachments With a Large Number of Contacts

Sy Weiss, one of the regular readers of this blog asked a question:

Good question.

There are quite a few ways using which you can share email attachments privately with a group of friends. But the easiest method is using a blog and we will be using Posterous for this tutorial.

Posterous is the easiest way to blog – all you have to do is email your content or images to a unique email address. Posterous will host the images in their servers and publish your email message instantly, after which you can share the message with anyone you want. Of course you can password protect your Posterous blog so that only your friends have access to your shared messages and attachments.

Following are the steps involved:

1. Go to Posterous and register for an account. It’s free and you can use your existing Facebook account to sign in.

2. Once you are in, create a new blog and note down the address.

3. In the next page, go to Privacy and choose “password protect my site”. Then choose a password for your Posterous blog and click “Save Settings”.

Since you would be sharing email messages and attachments with selected contacts, I have stressed on password protecting your site. You can skip this step if you want to share the attachments publicly.

4. Posterous will give you a unique email address in the format of post@yoursite.posterous.com.

5. You are ready to go. Login to your email account and select the message which you want to share. Forward the message containing the attachments to post@yoursite.posterous.com

6. You are done. Posterous will publish your entire email message and upload the images in their server. Your email message will be published as a blog post and will contain all the images that were in the body of the message or in the attachments.

7. Once your post is published, copy the URL and send it to all of your friends. Don’t forget to send them the password as well, (if you have password protected your blog).

The result will be something like the following:

Here is a live example (use  syweissxyz as the password )

All your friends can download the images and read the email message. You don’t have to download the images, upload them one by one and send it to your friends manually.

Another advantage of using the Posterous platform is that you can add contributors to your site. Other people can share images, messages or videos directly from their email inbox. All they have to do is compose a new email message, attach the files and send it to post@yoursite.posterous.com

The best thing with Posterous  is that you don’t have to download or install anything, can share stuff from any computer you want. It’s like an online whiteboard where you as well as your family members can share anything, yet keep things private.

More tips:

1. How to combine all email replies that respond to one subject
2. How to schedule emails